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Column: Jan van Neerven

Clean slate

Columnist Jan van Neerven believes that replacing the entire Executive Board offers opportunities. It worries him that the current Supervisory Board will appoint a new Board. It is time to start with a clean slate.

Jan van Neerven zit op een bruggetje

(Photo: Sam Rentmeester)

A new year, and already plenty to write about. At the end of last year, The Guardian reported that the word ‘kakistocracy’ was trending on the internet, and now The Economist has chosen it as Word of the Year. Meanwhile, the Integrity Office seems to be monitoring who attends the Mindlab theatre session. And once again, TU Delft has ranked bottom of the LNVH Monitor of Female Professors. There is a lot to say about this, but I’ll set it aside for now. The news that our entire Executive Board will be replaced is impossible to ignore.

Rumours had been circulating for a while, but it’s now official: the Chair of the Board is stepping down early, and the roles of Chair and Rector will once again be separated. The explanations make no direct reference to the social safety controversies of the past year, except for the usual platitudes about social safety being given ‘undivided attention’ and remaining a ‘continuing priority’ – by now familiar lip service. The Chair repeated this yet again at the end of his Dies speech: “During the year [2025], social safety will have my undivided attention. I feel responsible and highly motivated to get that on track. So expect me to work with undiminished energy on making our organisation more diverse, safe, sustainable, and outstanding”.

Instead, we are left with a lame-duck Board for another year

It would have been admirable if the Executive Board had candidly acknowledged its failures and resigned with immediate effect. How it should have been done showed very recently the Executive Board of art academy ArtEZ: the chairman stepped down even before the Inspectorate came out with a damning investigation report on ‘mismanagement’. In Delft, we are left with a lame-duck Board for another year, and one that is now largely impervious to criticism. Despite all the talk of ‘undivided attention’ and ‘continuing priority’, there is still no independent contact point for social safety, no updated Code of Conduct, no baseline measurement, and no moves to compensate victims. With the looming pressure of the Inspectorate’s upcoming recovery investigation, the Executive Board – which, incidentally, is the subject of an entire chapter in the Inspectorate’s report – hastily launched a biweekly walk-in session on social safety. Perhaps well-intentioned (“We’ve turned a corner”), but one wonders who thought this up.

The term of the only remaining member of the Executive Board ends this summer and will not be extended. The imminent replacement of the entire board presents new opportunities. However, I am concerned that the current Supervisory Board (RvT) is responsible for the appointments. The memory of how the RvT forced the reappointment of the current Chair through the councils without sharing the draft Inspectorate report with them is still fresh. Assuring the councils that nothing stood in the way of the reappointment, the RvT deliberately withheld explosive information contained in the report.

The fallout after publication – threats of legal action, intimidation of journalists, and a ‘Plan for Change’ that was slammed by the Inspectorate – was met with indifference by the RvT, who appeared to be content to simply stand by idly (‘The Executive Board has our full confidence’). In response to the recent letter from the CNV union to the Minister of Education which criticised the failing supervision, the RvT issued a bizarre back-and-forth statement to Delta: ‘We do take our responsibilities’.

The RvT Chair’s term also ends this summer. In my view, it too should not be renewed. It is time to truly start over again with a clean slate.

Jan van Neerven is an Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor of Mathematics at the Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics (EWI), where he heads the Analysis section. He is the author of several books in his field, received a Vidi and Vici grant from NWO, and is editor-in-chief of Indagationes Mathematicae. In 2024 he was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Columnist Jan Van Neerven

Do you have a question or comment about this article?

J.M.A.M.vanNeerven@tudelft.nl

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